Nina Totenberg
Nina Totenberg is NPR's award-winning legal affairs correspondent. Her reports air regularly on NPR's critically acclaimed newsmagazines All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition.
Totenberg's coverage of the Supreme Court and legal affairs has won her widespread recognition. She is often featured in documentaries — most recently RBG — that deal with issues before the court. As Newsweek put it, "The mainstays [of NPR] are Morning Edition and All Things Considered. But the creme de la creme is Nina Totenberg."
In 1991, her ground-breaking report about University of Oklahoma Law Professor Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment by Judge Clarence Thomas led the Senate Judiciary Committee to re-open Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings to consider Hill's charges. NPR received the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for its gavel-to-gavel coverage — anchored by Totenberg — of both the original hearings and the inquiry into Anita Hill's allegations, and for Totenberg's reports and exclusive interview with Hill.
That same coverage earned Totenberg additional awards, including the Long Island University George Polk Award for excellence in journalism; the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for investigative reporting; the Carr Van Anda Award from the Scripps School of Journalism; and the prestigious Joan S. Barone Award for excellence in Washington-based national affairs/public policy reporting, which also acknowledged her coverage of Justice Thurgood Marshall's retirement.
Totenberg was named Broadcaster of the Year and honored with the 1998 Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcasting from the National Press Foundation. She is the first radio journalist to receive the award. She is also the recipient of the American Judicature Society's first-ever award honoring a career body of work in the field of journalism and the law. In 1988, Totenberg won the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for her coverage of Supreme Court nominations. The jurors of the award stated, "Ms. Totenberg broke the story of Judge (Douglas) Ginsburg's use of marijuana, raising issues of changing social values and credibility with careful perspective under deadline pressure."
Totenberg has been honored seven times by the American Bar Association for continued excellence in legal reporting and has received more than two dozen honorary degrees. On a lighter note, Esquire magazine twice named her one of the "Women We Love."
A frequent contributor on TV shows, she has also written for major newspapers and periodicals — among them, The New York Times Magazine, The Harvard Law Review, The Christian Science Monitor, and New York Magazine, and others.
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An appeals court ruled last summer that the original trial judge did not secure an impartial jury for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The U.S. has asked the Supreme Court to review the decision.
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The court's 5-to-3 ruling came in the case of a man who had lived in the U.S. for 25 years but who had used a fake Social Security card to get a job as a janitor.
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In 2013, the court gutted a key provision of the law, citing that Section 2 of the act still bars discrimination in voting nationwide. Now, Section 2 is in the conservative court's crosshairs.
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The opinion said the case was "riddled with contingencies and speculation that impede judicial review." The president has been seeking to use a count that does not include undocumented immigrants.
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued four states that Biden won, claiming their changes to election procedures during the pandemic violated federal law.
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The suit, viewed as a baseless hail Mary attempt to get the justices to invalidate Joe Biden's election, has little to no chance of success.
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If President Trump succeeds, it will be the first time unauthorized immigrants will not be counted for purposes of drawing new congressional districts.
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At least two of the court's conservative justices seemed to suggest the law should stand whether or not the individual mandate is found unconstitutional.
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Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court, died from complications from cancer. Her death will set in motion what promises to be a tumultuous political battle over who will succeed her.
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The Supreme Court justice revealed on Friday that she had begun a course of chemotherapy on May 19. In a statement, she said she is still able to do her job "full steam."